“It’s like karaoke,” Rita Wilson quipped when Gwyneth Paltrow handed her the microphone to congratulate Amanda de Cadenet on her new Lifetime series, The Conversation. Wilson, Paltrow, Arianna Huffington, Donna Karan, and Diane von Furstenberg, who have all taped segments for the series, passed around a microphone to talk about taping the show at a celebratory dinner at the DVF studio in Manhattan on Sunday evening.

“I have to say that I felt very honored to be part of The Conversation,” Wilson said. “I already learned so much from the two episodes that have already aired. I learned from Gwyneth, and I learned from Lady Gaga.”

“[De Cadenet] has this gift. And it is a real gift—she is able to put people at ease and extract the most incredible bits of information out of them,” Paltrow told the crowd. The series encourages women to speak intimately about personal experiences. “I don’t remember what I said, and I haven’t seen it, so I may hate it,” von Furstenberg said of taping the show. “And so all I can say is that I sat on the sofa and I talked about myself, my favorite subject.”

“I’m interested in who people really are, and what they think, and what they really feel, so that’s what I like to talk about,” de Cadenet explained to VF.com about the format of the show, which is produced by Demi Moore. The party was packed with her powerful friends, including Tina Brown, Gayle King, Rashida Jones, Diane Kruger, and Wendi Murdoch, but many of those de Cadenet has had on the show are not acquaintances. “I had never met Jane Fonda, Zoe Saldana, Alicia Keys, Eva Longoria, Diane von Furstenberg,” she said. “And it’s a non-promotional show, so everybody who came came because they wanted to talk about a topic that they felt was important to women.”

“I forgot there was a camera there,” Arianna Huffington said. “You know, it was in her living room, she had her feet up, she hardly wore makeup; she looked like you just dropped in for a cup of coffee, and you’re chatting, and it was so intimate that I have no idea what I said.”

And when de Cadenet asked about her favorite sexual position? “I didn’t answer,” Huffington said briskly. Rita Wilson joined us, and said she too declined to answer that question on the show. “I like what Lady Gaga said: the best advice she was given was to be private in public.”